Useful Sprint Planning from a Certified Scrum Master

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- This is a small collection of sprint planning/story points allocation - tips and tricks that I use at work. They pretty much all come from our - in-house certified "Scrum Master". He's got much better experience than - I do with building a real working backlog of stories and planning - sprints based on those stories. That being said, any opinions here are - my own and I don't speak on his behalf. -

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Points as a Measure of Work

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- In my understanding, points are approximate measures of the amount of - work required to complete a given story or task. I do not think points - correlate to an exact measure of time. I use them to determine the size - of a task in relation to another task. For example, a simple-looking - task may be allocated 1 point. In reality this 1 point may take 1 minute - or 1 hour to complete. The time it takes is less important than the - ratio of time it takes in comparison to a second given task. Say the - second task appears to take twice as much time as the first (however - much time that may be). The second task would therefore get 2 points. -

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- Some teams have a special system for incrementing points. Our team uses - the - Fibonacci sequence of numbers. So the smallest amount that can be allocated to a story is 1. Then it - goes 2, 3, 5, 8, and so on and so forth. If a single story is going to - use up 8 points, you should probably take a look at breaking it up into - smaller tasks. A single story shouldn't take up almost half of your - allocated work for a sprint. -

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How Much is Enough?

- Our team aims for 10 points per 2-week per sprint. Simple enough for me, - but the hard part is determining how many points to allocate to a given - task. -

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- One thing I could never figure out is what the recommended starting - position for 1 point looks like. I'm sure this is something that comes - from experience, and our Scrum Master helped us out with that. -

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- 1 point: Small or basic text change. Updating configuration, fixing a - typo or cognitively simple bug. -
- 2 points: Task with light complexity. Some portions of code have to - change, be debugged, tested. -
- 3 points: Some complexity, will take time to implement. Potentially a - few days' worth of work. May require front- and back-end work, or - back-end and database work. -
- 5 points: Half a sprint's worth of more complicated work. Full-on - feature implementation for example. -

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Prioritizing Work

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- I do not see points as indicative of the importance or priority of a - task or story. Just because one task will take longer to complete than - another does not mean it's more or less important to me. There should be - another method of gauging which stories should be taken off the backlog - first. For example, one story might depend on another. One might relate - to core functionality that a stakeholder has asked for. Another task - might be required to make code build because it solves some major - problem! -

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- To communicate how "important" a task is, every story we have is - prioritized something like this: -

Critical
Blocker
Highest
High
Medium
Low
Lowest

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- Tasks that align with some long-term project that management is waiting - on are tagged "Highest". Stories that prevent lots of other stories from - being completed may be labeled "Blocker". -

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Sprint Planning/Backlog Refinement

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- With all that in mind, at the start of the sprint I now take about 10 - points worth of priority work off of the backlog. I'll work through it - the whole sprint through and then, ideally, it'll all be complete by the - end of the sprint. If I bit off more than I could chew and the sprint - ends before I'm finished, the incomplete work rolls over to the next - sprint and is the first to be completed. If I find I've finished - everything I had to work on and there are still a couple of days left in - the sprint, I'll take one or two small items off the backlog and work on - those. -

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Tools to Get the Job Done

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- Our team uses Jira at work, and I know some folks love it so much - they've paid for a personal license. It's a bit overkill for my personal - projects, so I've been using Nextcloud's Deck plugin. This is an okay - solution but it doesn't integrate very well with source code - repositories (although it can tie into a Nextcloud "project", or a - collection of related files open to a team). I'm spinning up a Gitea - server to replace my git-web server soon and this is one of - the reasons for that. Gitea has a GitHub-style issue tracker where you - can create issues of various kinds, assign them to users, reference - commits to the source, and create a Kanban-style board of issues that - are on the backlog, to-do, in-progress, or done. -

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- I'm still learning how to keep to a Scrum-like process of some kind, - because I do see the benefit of using such a system, especially in a - team. I'm definitely not an expert though so some of what I've got here - may change over time. Right now it's working well and that's good enough - for me. -